Democratic Institutions and Subjective Well-Being
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321716683203 |
| Author | Benjamin Radcliff,David Altman,Patrick Flavin |
| Date | 01 October 2017 |
| Published date | 01 October 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Political Studies
2017, Vol. 65(3) 685 –704
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321716683203
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Democratic Institutions and
Subjective Well-Being
David Altman1, Patrick Flavin2
and Benjamin Radcliff
3
Abstract
We examine how differences in how democracy is institutionalized affect life satisfaction across
nations. To our knowledge, this is the first rigorous, systematic study of this subject. Using data
for 21 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries from 1981
to 2008, we find robust evidence that citizens report living more satisfying lives in countries with a
parliamentary (rather than presidential) executive, a proportional representation electoral system
(as opposed to single member districts), and a unitary (rather than federal) governmental structure.
Moreover, the findings suggest that the real-world consequences for these types of democratic
institutions for human well-being are substantial, rivaling or exceeding other common predictors.
We conclude with a discussion of the practical and theoretical implications of the results.
Keywords
subjective well-being, life satisfaction, comparative institutions, democratic theory
Accepted: 7 October 2016
While the endorsement of abstract democratic principles is nearly universal among mod-
ern scholars of politics, profound disagreement remains over how best to institutionalize
the practice of democracy. With the established research program in empirical democratic
theory dating back to at least Joseph Schumpeter (1942) and the early behavioralists (e.g.
Dahl, 1956) as foundation, attention has increasingly been devoted to understanding the
tangible, real-world consequences not only of issues from the canon of traditional demo-
cratic thought but also more immediate questions of institutional and constitutional design
(e.g. Lijphart, 1984). This literature has proven to be one of the most vibrant and success-
ful in political science, as seen (among many other examples) in debates over presidential
1Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile
2Department of Political Science, Baylor University, Waco, TX, USA
3Department of Political Science, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA
Corresponding author:
Patrick Flavin, Department of Political Science, Baylor University, One Bear Place #97276, Waco, TX 76798,
USA.
Email: Patrick_J_Flavin@baylor.edu
683203PSX0010.1177/0032321716683203Political StudiesAltman et al.
research-article2016
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686 Political Studies 65 (3)
versus parliamentary systems, proportional representation (PR; in its various forms) ver-
sus single member districts (SMDs), and, particularly relevant to current world trends,
unitary versus federal governmental structures (e.g. Gerring and Thacker, 2008; Lijphart,
2012; Sartori, 1997).
The fact that there is debate on each of these (and other) poles of institutional
design speaks to a lack of consensus on the consequences of each type of institutional
choice. This may in part reflect ideological or theoretical differences around which
model of democracy we prefer, as reflected, say, in the dichotomies of “Madisonian”
versus “populist” democracy (Dahl, 1956) or, as William Riker (1982) prefers, in “lib-
eralism vs. populism,” to say nothing of many other forms (see Held, 1996).
Assessments of different types of institutional features, nonetheless, have come to
reflect not merely preferences over the ultimate nature of what democracy should or
can be (given our political values or our theoretical appraisal of preference aggrega-
tion), but, more simply, what the tangible, direct, and immediate consequences of dif-
ferent institutional schemes are for human life. There is thus a vast and growing
literature on the real-world consequences of each type of institutional choice across a
variety of outcomes, ranging from political stability and regime survival, to quality of
governance, to fiscal implications, and a host of other issues (for a general discussion,
see Gerring and Thacker, 2008).
What is conspicuously lacking from the literature are attempts to transcend argumenta-
tion on how different types of institutions affect particular dimensions of democratic per-
formance—whose consequences for the quality of human life are in any event themselves
passionately disputed. Instead, the focus is on what many would argue to be the final vari-
able interest: the degree to which human beings lead lives that they themselves find posi-
tive and rewarding. Surely, whatever the consequences of institutional design are for the
myriad of issues they have been argued to affect (typically with a lack of consensus as to
whether or how much), and however intrinsically important those issues may be, in the
end we care about institutions not for their own sake but because we believe that they
ultimately have consequences for the quality of human life itself.
In this article, we attempt such an analysis by considering the effects of different types
of democratic institutions on subjective well-being (SWB). Of course, there has been
some attention to how different degrees of democracy, generally defined and operational-
ized through broad indices such as Polity or Freedom House, affect life satisfaction
(Bjørnskov et al., 2010). In this regard, particular emphasis is sometimes given to the
cumulative history of democracy (Dorn et al., 2007). While this is of obvious importance,
particularly in the study transitions to democracy or the process of democratization more
generally, we ask a different question: How do different ways of institutionalizing democ-
racy affect quality of life within the context of the established, stable industrial democra-
cies? Simply put, we ask whether, and to what extent, different ways of institutionalizing
representative democracy determine the overall quality of human life, “using the extent
to which people actually enjoy being alive as the appropriate evaluative metric” (Pacek
and Radcliff, 2008: 237). This type of empirical investigation is now possible because of
the development of a sophisticated literature devoted to the study of life satisfaction. With
the refinement of the tools necessary to measure with reasonable reliability and validity
how people evaluate the quality of their lives, we are capable of measuring SWB in a
rigorous fashion, theorizing about the concrete conditions that determine such differ-
ences, and testing the resulting empirical predictions (for reviews, see Frey and Stutzer,
2002; Radcliff, 2013).
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